This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

I ask because Andrew Brown has claimed it is in his CiF blog, and atheism campaigner Ariane Sherine has strongly disagreed. CiF Belief is an engine that runs on this debate, but it’s an angle I hadn’t thought of before so I thought it was worth chewing over.

Brown’s Case

Brown’s short blog post actually advances several separate claims:

1. “[I]n the US, the new atheism is a reassuring fundamentalism for the college educated”
2. “Educated atheism” — the kind characterised by reading Dawkins, attending meetings of your local humanist society and so on — is “an entirely middle-class phenomenon”;
3. In the UK, “unlike the US, the poor are not devout”;
4. Atheism gives the British pseudo-intellectual a group of “despicable believers” against whome to define their own identity, and who “are for the most part lower class”;

I certainly agree with one of Brown’s sentiments, which is that “[s]ocial movements work for social causes more than intellectual ones”; that is, that sociology rather than philosophy is probably the right tool to use to examine something like the rise of contemporary forms of atheism. What’s more, I think it’s interesting and worthwhile to think about movements like this while bracketing off our desire to engage with the arguments themselves. This is something anthrolopogists are trained to do, and it’s an interesting intellectual discipline.

Yet the comments on Brown’s piece display much resistance to the idea that atheism has become a movement, even an identity, for enough people now that it needs this sort of analysis. One objects that “atheism is merely a conclusion based on the evidence”, in other words that it represents belief in a single, specific proposition only; the sentiment is repeated elsewhere, including by Sherine.

This, I think, is manifestly untrue. I’m no sociologist but spending a little time on atheist messageboards soon suggests that there is a whole world-view here for us to subscribe to. It isn’t dogmatic in all of its details but it’s certainly more than a single, bare opinion that “God doesn’t exist”. Try going on one of those sites as an atheist who isn’t an ontological naturalist, an atheist who finds social-constructivist or incommensuabilist accounts of science compelling or an atheist who thinks social structures based around religious beliefs are an important part of the cultural fabric. Or try masquerading as a conservative atheist who expresses illiberal views or right-wing politics. You may or may not be made to feel welcome, but you’ll certainly feel like an outsider, because your views will differ sharply from those of the majority. As far as I can see these communities really don’t appear to exhibit complete pluralism on all points aside from the statement “God doesn’t exist”.

Where are the Demographics?

Brown’s article is, however, extremely flimsy stuff for one simple reason. As the commenters delight in pointing out, he appears to have simply made up all of the demographics he’s quoting. This might partly be caused by the CiF tradition, carried over from the main news section of the Guardian website, of not linking to research that’s used in the piece, but you should still say where your research came from. So Brown is guilty either of plagiarism — using someone else’s research without citing it — or making stuff up to suit his argument. Whichever it was, he comes out looking foolish.

I’m no demographer but I can use Google like anyone else. Those identifying their religion as Christian, Hindu, Sikh or Jewish are way more likely to be homeowners than those self-identifying as having “no religion”; this might be an indicator of class, might it not? On the other hand, it seems true that atheists are a bit more likely to have at least one qualification than believers in most major religions.

Further floundering around the 2001 census continues to suggest that the picture is very murky, and there are many more factors to take into account than the data permits. Determining whether atheism really is a middle class phenomenon would take a lot more work, and might not be possible at all, even assuming we had a robust enough definition of class in contemporary British society to start with. The kinds of anecdotal my-mate’s-an-atheist-plumber comments Brown’s article has drawn don’t tell us anything except that there are at least a handful of exceptions, which you’d expect even with a rock-solid statistical case.

Sherine’s article attempts a similar tack, but she doesn’t even manage that properly as she’s preoccupied with selling her Christmas stocking-filler, a book containing brain-dumps from a range of exactly the kinds of atheists Brown happens to be talking about. Of course, if Brown is lamenting that the public representatives of atheism are middle class then he’s got an easier case to make since journalists, academics, professional speakers and suchlike do jobs that most of us would, I think, consider to be middle class. The same could be said for those who speak and write on behalf of religious groups.

Individualism

So yes, this is a rather woolly bit of point-countepoint, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth considering here. The idea that something you subscribe to is a sociological phenomenon, and that you may be exhibiting statistically predictable behaviour, is extremely disturbing whether we’re talking about religious faith (which on some, but not all, accounts is supposed to be elective) or atheism (which is often grounded on a kind of received and decontextualized verson of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?“) or something else.

It reminds me of Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. One of the most simple yet shocking things about it — and subsequent studies, which have partly overturned some of his claims — is that about the same number of people commit suicide every year. Every act of suicide is a specific, highly personal response to a unique set of circumstances; it’s also rare relative to the size of the population. Surely we would expect the number of times this happens in a year to be highly variable. At the moment it swings between 15 and 25 a year per 100,000 population for men. It’s never as high as 30 or as low as 10. This strikes me as remarkable. What’s more, different coutries have different annual suicide rates, equally stable, suggesting there may be social or cultural variations that make a difference to whether someone takes their own life or not.

I think the resistance to Brown’s kind of argument — aside from his complete lack of evidence — is partly fuelled by the sense that atheism is arrived at by the rational individual who has weighed all the available evidence. This kind of sentiment is expressed in quite a few comments. It amounts to a rejection of determinism, an assertion of the free will of the individual thinker over the machinery of impersonal class conflict.

No individual act of suicide can be predicted by population statistics, but the regularity of the phenomenon of suicide clearly cries out for sociological explanations alongside purely psychological ones. In a similar way, no individual belief can be predicted using a socio-political analysis. Yet if these beliefs are correlated with a wider set of beliefs that are themselves the bases of emergent communities we should, I think, be checking them out on those terms as well as purely individualistic ones.